2020 Short Film Intensive: Miami

Kat Candler’s short films Hellion and Black Metal and her feature Hellion played at the Sundance Film Festival. Candler's work in television includes directing Queen Sugar, 13 Reasons Why, Sorry for Your Loss and Dirty John, producing directing and showrunning Queen Sugar and consulting producing 13 Reasons Why. She’s currently developing a horror film for Fox Searchlight and a TV series for TNT.

Kenny Riches’ 2015 feature film, The Strongest Man, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. He is currently releasing his latest film, A Name Without A Place (2019). His producer credits include My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (Tribeca 2020), Sanzaru (Slamdance 2020). He co-founded The Davey Foundation, a grant-giving organization for filmmakers and co-owns production company, Dualist.

Jason Fitzroy Jeffers is a Miami-based filmmaker and writer from Barbados whose work focuses on giving voice to the often-marginalized stories of the tropics. His work has appeared on outlets such as The Intercept and National Geographic and at festivals such as Sundance, TIFF and Berlinale. Jason is cinematic arts senior manager at Oolite Arts, one of Miami’s largest support organizations for visual artists, and co-executive director of Third Horizon, a Caribbean filmmaking collective that stages the annual Third Horizon Film Festival.

Mike Plante is a senior programmer for short films at the Sundance Film Festival, where he has worked since 2001. Each year he and a team of 9 shorts programmers go through over 10,000 entries to select 70 shorts to play at the Festival, discovering new film talent in the process. He has worked at film festivals since 1993, and he also makes feature documentaries. His recent film And With Him Came the West (2019) played at MoMA Doc Fortnight and his short The Polaroid Job (2017) is available at The New York Times Op-Docs.

Amber Espinosa-Jones is the manager of Sundance’s Institute’s Outreach and Inclusion Program, where she supports artists from underrepresented communities through intersectional fellowships and community programs. As an independent producer and stage manager from Oakland, CA, she has worked for a number of arts organizations pushing the boundaries in mainstream media, including the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP), Ford Theatres, and Latino Theater Company.